Ping's Identity Metasystem demo

Earlier this summer, just before the Burton Group Catalyst conference, Andre Durand and Ashish Jain of Ping Identity really surprised me with a lovely Identity Metasystem demo that combined use of Information Cards and federation technology.

I don't think anything I've seen demonstrates more concretely why “federation” and “user centricity” are different and yet complementary.

The demo is built around Ping Federate, which speaks four protocols for transporting SAML tokens around: SAML 1.0, SAML 1.1, SAML 2.0, and WS-Federation. Since it speaks all these federation dialects, it can talk to any federating system regardless of its dialect – for example WebSphere, Presentation Server, Windows 2003 and .NET, Tomcat, SAP, Web Logic, Salesforce.com, SiteMinder, CoreID, etc.

But even better, the user has a rational experience as well – just seeing this circle of trust as being accessed through an Information Card.

To play the demo:

Use Windows Media Player. (You will need the Techsmith Screen Capture Codec (TSCC). If your system complains it doesn't have the right codec, pick it up here.) If you want to watch this and don't have any way to see it with Windows Media Player, let me know and I'll make a version for Quicktime.